Student Awareness and Preferences for Learning Analytics Dashboards: Misalignments with Self-Regulation of Learning

Abstract Dashboards can be a source of feedback that helps students in their learning process by fostering their agency. With that aim, the pieces of information they contain and how they are displayed are relevant variables, so students can use them for self-regulating their learning. Previous research shows what information contributes to better planning, monitoring, or self-reflection. Therefore, exploring student preferences can contribute to more motivating designs and greater use of dashboards. This paper presents the results of a survey administered to 1020 students from a face-to-face university. Knowing grades and the reasons behind them seem to be the most prominent preferences for students regarding learning analytics dashboards. Students’ use of dashboards seems to be unrelated to the promotion of self-regulation, as students use them for extrinsic motivation purposes. Consequently, there is a need to combine various pieces of information that turn dashboards into attractive and useful tools complementary to those with a greater potential for promoting self-regulation.